Battlefield 3

Talking Battlefield 3 Multiplayer

Though we didn’t see any multiplayer in action during our cover story visit to DICE, that didn’t stop us from prying some revealing answers from executive producer Patrick Bach.

This is an extended version of the interview that ran in the March 2011 issue of Game Informer.

The experienced player understands and appreciates the teamwork concept in Battlefield’s multiplayer, but you often see new players lone wolfing it and missing the point entirely. How do you break through that barrier?We’ve been asking ourselves that question – why don’t people play it. Because when you’ve put some hours into it it’s like, “this is way better than the competition.” The problem isn’t only on the game side, it’s how do you get to the point where everyone has tried it? Even if you have a demo or you gave away free samples you still need people to try it. The challenge is to get people to try it because we know that they will get hooked when they do. But also on the teamplay aspect it’s a deeper layer that most other shooters don’t have. The hurdle is to make sure that we lower the threshold to get into the game by letting everyone try it out. The running and gunning should be extremely accessible. That’s something we’re working toward with every iteration of the game while deepening the game so once you get hooked, there’s enough depth to play to get people to come back.

Bad Company 2 came out of the gates quickly, placing in the top three on Xbox Live for several months. Then you went six months without delivering new maps and the community fell off drastically. Do you plan on taking a different approach with Battlefield 3?We have a big focus on sustaining the game. To be honest, Bad Company 2 was a bigger success than we anticipated. We did not account for that. We sold a lot of copies and don’t feel bad about where we were, but looking back, we should have released more, bigger content earlier. The challenge is to build a game, and then have more people coming on before the project is done to start building extra content because it takes a lot of time to get stuff out. Even if you’re done with something it takes another one-to-two months to get it on the net so to speak. We’ve learned our lesson now, and have a lot of really interesting plans for how to keep the attention of the players. We can do better in that area.

One of the things I felt went hand-in-hand with the lack of new maps was that, anecdotally, a lot of people stopped playing around level 25 because there was no longer a carrot dangling in front of them in terms of unlockables. Why did you decide on that approach, and do you plan on altering the progression in Battlefield 3?It falls back on what I said earlier – we were much more successful with our approach than we anticipated. We didn’t think most people would hit level 22 to be honest, and especially not so fast. Our calculations on how much people would play to hit level 20, 25, 50 were completely wrong. Thought people wouldn’t play that much. We’re looking into the numbers of how we scale up, what we give away, how we give it away, with the understanding that some people put a lot of time into the game. There will be a lot more to unlock, not only weapons and other treats, but we have more things that you can unlock than in Bad Company 2, and we’re also making sure that there is a reason for you to reach the top rank. It doesn’t just end. There will be a lot of focus on persistence and how we present stuff to the player.One of the things that helps persistence is when you give the player an identity. For instance, you can carve your initials into your gun in Black Ops, and Rainbow Six let you customize your outfit. What are the challenges to this approach and do you see Battlefield 3 going in this direction?The more variation you have [in the characters] the less variation you can have in the rest of the world. I think it also has to do with the way you play more professionally. You don’t want people to look completely different. It’s team A versus team B. It’s always a challenge – how do you personalize a uniform? Giving the pink rabbit hat to someone would make it fun, but if you’re running around and you don’t know what you’re shooting at you don’t take the professional gaming seriously in my book. So there’s a challenge between personalizing and keeping it uniform. We will do more in that area, making sure that you can get your character to be more personalized both in a visual way and more specifically in the way you gear up. We did a good job I would argue in Bad Company 2 with specializations, different scopes, and different weapons – you can kind of find your way of playing the game, which broadens the game for more people. The deeper you get into that the more you unravel figuring new things out every day. That was kind of the seed to what we’re building now. We now know more than we’ve ever known about how to personalize a uniform team. Your friends will get very happy when they can see what they can do with their soldiers.When I think about Battlefield 2, I always come back to the Commander position and the game within the game that arose from having Special Forces objectives. Are those returning in the proper sequel? We could implement it but the question is how do you get the threshold lower? That’s not by making it more complicated. Our challenge is to make sure that anyone that just jumps into the game will get it. One of the biggest problems with Commander was that only two people could use it. Some people liked it but most people didn’t care, they just cared that someone gave them an order or that their squad could play together having fun on their own more or less. Then the more hardcore people went into the Commander mode and learned how to use that. You could argue it was a great feature, but looking at the numbers you could also say that no one uses it. We tried in Bad Company 2 to give that to the players, so you could issue orders to your squad, and you could use gadgets like the UAV that only the commander could use earlier – giving the power back to the players so everyone could use it. That made a big difference. More people could enjoy the game. We lowered the threshold for everyone because we gave it to everyone. We now know where the boundaries are for keeping the strategic depth and complexity while lowering the threshold to get in.Since Battlefield 2 you’ve toyed with the amount of classes – that game had seven classes, Battlefield 1943 had only three, and Bad Company 2 had four. Do you think you’ve found the sweet spot? Yes, I think the sweet spot is four. Looking at what we’ve done so far, we see the classes as a starting point. Classes are kind of “Who am I? Well, I’m this kind of person. I want to help out or play in this way.” Then as you go along you will find different nuances of that class. If you look at the amount of classes you actually have in Bad Company 2 with all of the different loadouts, it’s probably a couple of thousand, compared to 1942, which was quite static. So the sweet spot for entry is around four. Then it’s about how much you branch it. It’s a never-ending discussion that’s a matter of what kind of toys you want the player to have and how you balance it out. The rock, paper, scissors theory is still the foundation of every Battlefield game. A lot of people come up to me and say “You should increase the power of that gun, or you should make this gun better, or you should add nukes." The easy response to that is "How is that fun for the person getting shot at?" Because that needs to be the balance – if there’s no counter to a weapon, then we won’t put it in the game. There should always be a way of countering, so then you get this circle of death where if you have the means to kill me, I can switch gear and find means to get back at you. There shouldn’t be any über class or über weapons. Some games have perks where you kill the game by using it, and you do it over and over again. That’s no fun, that’s a game breaker. If someone gets really good at flying a chopper, then people say the chopper is overpowered. No, you just haven’t learned how to counter it, because there is a counter. That’s the kind of depth you want in a Battlefield game. It actually takes time until someone figures it out. We often compare ourselves to sports. You have a game with a set of rules, but there are a million ways of playing that game still even though the rule set is very solid and it hasn’t changed for 100 years. Every game is completely new. There is always a way to counter the opponent. Like football, or basketball, or soccer, the game is always evolving, yet the rules are the same. People adapt and find new ways.

I wish they had somewhat more customizable classes but I can't make these demands without base. All I can say at this point is I will buy it since the Battlefield series has always had a special place in my heart. At least they let me pick my weapons and if I want to revive people or snipe at people and so on.

Edit: Additionally I'm glad to see they are doing what i trust to be the correct thing to do in any type of popular game such as the Battlefield series. They are looking into how it was done in their past games and are saying "We could have done this better, and we will do it better" which helps the gaming market as a whole progress into new and undiscovered territory. All of this in spite of the possible scrutiny they could suffer from fans with very high standards.

The only question I want an answer to regarding BF3 multiplayer is "How are you going to avoid the horrendous balancing issues found in Bad Company 2?"

Obviously certain balancing issues only become apparent when the game's already out there with loads of people playing it, but since they refuse to let people mod / create their own balances in any way, at the very least they should respond to imbalances MUCH quicker than they did in BC2.

I mean, what's the point in having stats and rankings when there's a class / weapon that's far easier and superior to others? Get it right this time please, DICE. Or give us the tools to get it right for you once the game's out there.

The reason why some people play as lonewolfes is simply explained:
You dont get enough from playing with the team. Most people dont care about winning the round or not, they just want to get more points by kills, and its often easier to get kills as lonewolf than in the team.
The problem would be solved if you would get the same points for some actions by teamplay as by kills. I mean, the same amount of points. There have been tryings in the last BFs, but it didnt really work...

I like the people of Dice think man, its like if you were working right there. For every overpower there's a counter, so lets hope people dont star with the crybaby topics of how things are overpowered. Cant wait for a release date, this game will decimate all!!

"We’ve been asking ourselves that question – why don’t people play it. Because when you’ve put some hours into it it’s like, “this is way better than the competition.”"
Make the game to the best of your abilities and let the consumer decide who/which games they think are best. Boasting about being the best when you're eating the dust of an 800lb. gorilla isn't a smart move regardless of how awesome your game (and yes, it is awesome) is.
Now I’ll get on to the topic. I think having to put in “some hours” to learn the nuances of Battlefield’s multiplayer is the crux of the problem of what turns some people off about it. For me, that is the fun part of Battlefield. You actually learn to strategize and look at the load-out of your team to find out how to best compliment your mates. It helps to put the time in to learn how to properly and expertly drive all the vehicles. Mastering the different classes is also crucial as you never know what you might have to do to counteract your opponent. Call of Duty is all about having the fastest trigger finger and best accuracy. It’s fun and is really easy to pick up and play because there is little strategy (compared to Battlefield anyway).

The only request I have is that they fix game balancing of teams and overall population. It sucks to join a game where there is like only 2 other people, I usually backout and search for another, but still I beleive Dice can fix this.

btw hats off to Dice for still using dedicated servers, since I got the game in March last year, I have not run into anything that resembled a mod or hack. Call of duty has yet to implement this system, and it is one of many things that makes Battlefield a great game.

As for choppers being too over-powered I'm kinda on the fence, yeah if a guy knows how to fly, he can really wreak havoc and litteraly dominate the map. But there are counters like the Carl Gustav, Flak cannon, and the Vads (which can make flying almost impossible) that can counter even seasoned pilots if placed in the right hands.

One more request. IMO I think tanks should be a little more powerful, they don't seem to haveas much shock value in BC2. I wan't people to run when they see a tank, not step out in the middle and fire 2-3 rockets and bam tank is dead!

Hopefully they start to freakin crack down on these aimbot using cheating bass tards! there is too many. other than that I'm confident we'll recieve a very very good game here. RIP call of... wait what am i saying? burn in hell COD!

Sounds like they know what they are doing. I would like more of a personal connection tied to my character like different clothing options or customizable emblems like Black Ops and Halo but there is not a whole lot Bad Company 2 did wrong.
When does this game come out again? Have they narrowed it down to this year at least? My subscription expired right before the Battlefield 3 issue.

I am really excited for this game but I am most worries that they are going to take away my beloved commander position. That was my favorite potion of the game. I would almost always rack up insane amounts of point playing as commander in BF2 and as long as my team followed my orders, they would win more than half the time.

more, better dlc; more unlockables; more personalization. all sounds good. nevermind the excellent gameplay footage so far. my biggest issue, and i can't see the second page so apologies if there, is flight controls. whether bfbc1 or 2 i could never learn gunship controls, and plane controls in bf43 had a big learning curve. if that was more intuitive, it would be a solid all-around experience. still d*mn good tho. ;)

Two things I hope they fix for Battlefield 3:
1. I hope they make their match making system more intelligent. Half of the time the current one will dump you into a map of odds of say 8 vs 3. After the map is completed it rarely evens out the teams so you get stuck outnumbered until everyone eventually quits.
2. Helicopters. I'm not saying make them super easy to get down but I disagree with them being able to remove tracer darts. Already hard enough to hit them with the darts only to have them be poofed off lol.

As much as I hate him saying "You have to counter this, you have to counter that", he's right. I love sniping but unfortunately people don't like me sniping them. One of the reasons I love hardcore mode. To escape the camera hehe.

I'm also a fan of hunting other snipers. It's quite challenging sometimes but can be very rewarding.